"Around 38,000 people are living in deplorable
conditions and unfit for humans."

Are Palestinians Being Scapegoated Over
Army Killings in Lebanon

Franklin Lamb

Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp

The killings of three Palestinian
refugees this past week including Ahmad Qassim from Nahr al Bared ( "cold
river') camp near Tripoli and 15 year old Khaled al-Youssef from Ein el Helwe
(" the beautiful eye') 30 miles south of Beirut in Saida, and the
wounding of more than a dozen others by the Lebanese army were not, as some
Lebanese politicians are claiming, " accidental security
incidents". They were avoidable negligent homicides as much so as Zionist
occupation forces and settler/colonists in Palestine regularly commit.

It is true that Lebanon's army, like
the country itself, is confessionalized and as it has done before, the army
will likely fracture if a civil conflict erupts. It is also undertrained,
weak on discipline, and ill equipped. But from this observer's experience
and learning from friends in the army, the least that can be said on its behalf
is that it is no worse and is probably more humane than some others in the region.

Some in the Palestinian community
fear that the recent killings of refugees by the army represents a
revival of what in the Lebanese army it has often meted out to Palestinians
and that it may be intensifying 30 years after the massacre at Sabra-Shatila.

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon
are the worst 12 of the 57 UN established camps in the Levant including Jordan,
Syria, Gaza and occupied Palestine in terms of problems of poverty ( 65
per cent of Palestinian family living in camps in Lebanon live on less than six
dollars a day), health, education, general living conditions, discrimination,
isolation, joblessness, shanty housing and a lack of proper elementary and
secondary schools, forbidden by law to enroll in state colleges,
lack of adequate clinics, hospitals and sewage systems as well
essentially no potable water, little fresh air and sunlight in many areas
of the camps, rising respiratory diseases, domestic abuse and psychological
health issues. Contributing to all of the above is the outlawing of
Palestinians enjoying the elementary civil right to work or the own a home.

During a recent visit to the camps,
Muhammad Farwana, a member of Hamas's politburo described the Nahr al-Barid
camp in which "around 38,000 people are living in deplorable conditions and
unfit for humans." He added: "I visited Nahr al-Baredd and no human being
can lead a normal life in it. Not even animals can have a normal life in it."

No refugees on earth are so targeted
and discriminated again as Lebanon's Palestinians and only some political help
and negligible economic assistance sporadically arrives from the Palestinian
Authority in Ramallah. Not even the employees at its Embassy of Palestine in
Beirut have been paid their salaries for the past two months due significantly
to US and EU aid shrinkage aimed at forcing yet more concessions from the PA in
favor the Zionist occupiers of their country.

Every camp Palestinian family in
Lebanon can recount cases of arbitrary arrests, beatings, false imprisonment
and harassment from the army's Military Intelligence unit, the supposedly
disbanded Deuxieme Bureau. This Stasi type organization -- supposedly reformed --
hunted and terrorized Palestinians following the PLO departure from Beirut in
August of 1982. According to long time PLO representative in Lebanon
Shafiq al Hout in his wonderful book, My Life in the PLO , the Deuxieme Bureau was a
major factor in 70,000 departing Lebanon in just1983 via Beirut airport.

The army initially suspected that
the motor bike riders it stopped at Nahr al Bared camp had no ID. This
was a reasonable assumption because thousands of Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon have no ID because the country where they were born, Lebanon, refuses
to provide them ID, thus depriving them of even the few rights given their
fellow Palestinian refugees. Most Palestinians, for example, who
arrived in Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan in 1970 never registered
with the Lebanese barely functioning bureaucracy and despite a quarter century
of promises by politicians here to remedy "the non-ID problem" it's been just
more idle talk with not action being taken. Once more the non-ID issue has
become a deadly one and officials promising yesterday to solve the
problem. Lebanon's politicians will likely do nothing unless they see
some significant personal benefit. Hence non-ID Palestinians will remain
subject to arrest at any time, not able to register their marriages or get ID's
for their children or achieve a score of other civil acts that require a
government issued ID.

While a meeting was held between a
number of officers including the head of Army Intelligence, Edmond Fadel, with
a delegation of Palestinian factions in order to restore calm in the camp there
is little confidence that much was achieved except another pledge on behalf of
Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji to uncover the details of the crime
"through a swift investigation that will determine the perpetrators and prevent
a similar incident from occurring in the future." Given past experience, few
believe the investigation will be serious or even completed.

Compounding these problems is a
number of politicians who lack the political will to provide a simple available
solution. Lebanon's Interior Minister on 6/20/12 told Akbar al-Youm news
agency that "the disturbances" (army killing of Palestinian civilians) that
occurred lately in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein al-Hilweh were not
related to what had happened in Nahr al-Bared refugee camp" What happened in
the two Palestinian camps has nothing to do with the security situation in
Lebanon. They were just coincidence. The problems inside the camps have
been resolved by the Lebanese army."

This gross mischaracterization of
what occurred at the camps this past week is inflaming passions even
more. Every 9 year old anywhere in Lebanon knows that the "incident" in
Ein el Helwe was a direct and predictable result of the army's killing in Nahr
al Bared. What is remarkable is the restraint shown by refugees in the other 10
camps and dozen "gatherings'.

Taking the opposite view from the
Interior Minister, the Speaker of Lebanon's Parliament chimed in with the
observation that: "The incidents at the Palestinian camps and the targets
against the Lebanese army are not coincidence and not innocent and call for
concern. A foreign plot is present but there is an internal participation in
it," he warned, reiterating that the security incidents from the North to the
South are not a coincidence.